The crazy weather has delayed the wild raspberry harvest, but it's a pretty big one all the same.
This of course reminded me of the lesson of the wild raspberries: in nature as in fiction, something what you want to work, doesn't. The cultivated raspberries I planted years ago have been completely overrun.
Meanwhile, the wild ones are flourishing – so much so, that I'm having to cut them back so they don't take over the entire back yard.
The similarity to writing has only grown more pronounced. Since I wrote the post linked above, I've written two more novels and am now working on a third. This is a project I'd set aside years ago when it was roughly halfway finished. I figured it was but a short sprint to the end.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the final draft – I realized the story didn't work as well as I thought it did all those years ago. Thus, I've ended up not just heavily re-writing it to improve its style and flow, I've actually jettisoned the entire cast in favor of a new one. Only a couple of bit-part players have managed to survive, and even they got some form of re-working.
Unless you have the courage to do that, you end up with a stilted piece of bad writing. We see this all the time in contemporary culture where characters do things the writer wants them to do rather than what would organically flow from the character's prior behavior. It's jarring and wrecks the story.
Maybe the next book will stink, but it will at least have a consistent flow.
Chateau Lloyd 
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